Crossing campus this afternoon, a student whose exam is later this week asked me “when you ask a real-world question on the exam and you want us to solve an ODE, can we just do it using formula we memorised from A-level physics?” Like what? “Like with one of the distance questions we might just use $v^2 = u^2 + 2as$.” I said that if they were relying on a result we didn’t use in the module and that they hadn’t proven, this would be a problem.

In the excellent $\pi$ approximation video, Katie Steckles asked for $\pi$ approximations. I teach a first year techniques module (mostly calculus and a little complex numbers and linear algebra). This year I have changed a few bits in my module; in particular I gave some of my more numerical topics to the numerical methods module and took in return some of the more analytic bits from that module. This gives both modules greater coherence, but it means I have lost one of my favourite examples, from the Taylor series topic, which uses a Maclaurin series to approximate $\pi$.

I saw the video below, which is Rachel Riley being asked questions about her maths education at a Your Life event, in a tweet by Rob Loe, who quoted a section of one answer around 4:50 where Rachel says: “stop saying proudly that ‘I’m really bad at maths’ because you wouldn’t say ‘I can’t read’, you wouldn’t say ‘I can’t write’ as a proud thing.”

You probably remember Relatively Prime. This is a series of audio podcasts from my sometime collaborator Samuel Hansen, including stories about checkers, survival housing, swine flu, juggling, a Spanish basilica, and an alien civilization in England. They’re good. Go and listen to them.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively playing the game Twenty on my phone. Then I decided to make my own game in a similar vein. The fact that my wife has consistently been ahead of my high scores has nothing to do with it.